Tag Archives: Tom Ripley

Generally speaking, I don’t think writers know who they are; it’s a disability–and an advantage–they share with actors. And it’s probably just as well, really. Self-knowledge can lead to self-consciousness, and in a writer self-consciousness can only lead to self-parody. Or silence.

Whereas actors receive an endless supply of surrogate identities in the roles they’re given to play, writers tend to begin their search for identity in their predecessors. Every one of us began by imitating the writers we loved to read. Those writers had made their worlds so real and appealing for us that we tried to move in and live there.

Donald E. Westlake, from the Introduction to the Gregg Press edition of The Hunter.

I’ve had this article in mind for quite a while now, and I’ve put off writing it for a reason. I didn’t have all the pieces to the puzzle. And I still don’t, and it’s increasingly clear to me that I may never have them all. I keep coming across another piece, then still another, and they’ve started to accumulate. I’ve got a pile of books on my desk to prepare for writing this, and I just realized, the morning I started writing this, that there’s another book I have to read, and thankfully it’s on Kindle, so I can download it, finish it in a day or two, and see if it’s worth adding to the pile. But the pile will probably never stop growing. So maybe I better start writing.

The Hunter is a deceptively simple book, much like Parker is a deceptively simple character. There are hidden depths under all that bare bones language, those emotionless onyx eyes. It runs 155 tersely worded pages in the original paperback edition–a book that was specifically designed to fit any decent-sized pocket, which is why the publisher called itself Pocket Books. I’ve often taken that quite literally, when in the process of reading one in the course of a workday. That image of the book up top is substantially larger than the book itself, at least on my computer screen. Your device may differ. But the book itself, in any edition, never changes, never dates, never needs an upgrade.

You can get lost in those 155 pages. I’ve no idea how many online reviews there are (in all languages? hundreds, at least), but a while back, somebody actually started a blog devoted to nothing more than analyzing the entire book, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. And I thought that a worthy endeavor, and also thought maybe he didn’t have quite enough context to pull it off yet, but look who’s talking. He stopped updating, and now I can’t find it anymore.

Those who try to bring this story to life in another medium invariably founder on the rocks of its seemingly simple narrative, adding bells and whistles, subtracting sense–of all its adapters, the late Darwyn Cooke (sad to type ‘the late’ before his name, but everybody’s elevens come up sometime) got closest, by sticking closest. Still far from a match. I doubt anybody will ever really capture it. Like its ‘hero,’ it just can’t adjust to life in captivity. It always breaks out–slips through the cracks, and it’s gone.

I’m not a deconstructionist–I don’t really want to take it apart like a watch to find out how it works–I can’t do that with a real watch, not that I wear one anymore (even they’ve become obsolescent, except as status symbols). Westlake often admitted he never fully understood what makes Parker tick. But he wasn’t averse to explaining what made him, personally, tick–as a writer. What, and whom. If he liked another writer, learned something from that writer, somewhere or other, he talked about that writer, made his admiration known. Some he liked much better than others, but a useful lesson–positive or negative–might come from anywhere.

So before I get lost in prologue, let me state the point of this article–I’m looking for all the stories that went into the making of this particular story, and the intimidating figure at its center. In that introduction I quoted up top, Westlake made it clear there were many. I’ve made it clear I may never know how many. Westlake was a voracious and omnivorous reader, who also cheerfully admitted to borrowing heavily from the movies (or had Stark admit it for him). Maybe you’ve seen some things I’ve missed. Maybe that’s what the comments section is for.

When I first discovered the Parker novels, only a few years back, I saw people speculating on their influences. They would mention books, and I’d read them. I usually ended up feeling that yes, there were parallels, but not very close ones. Then I’d read something I didn’t connect at all with Parker, more or less by chance, and I’d find something that seemed very direct and obvious to me. Like this book.

That’s the first edition to the left, from 1936, but I read the 1955 Bantam Books reprint edition to the right, with the title changed to match the Alan Ladd film–and not nearly so pristine a copy as you see above, either. Picked it up vacationing in Colorado–one of those tiny paperback exchange shops you sometimes find in aging strip malls. There’s a lot of Greene I’ve yet to get to, and this was one of those.

Believing then, as I do now, that Parker is a wolf in human form, and that Westlake at least sometimes wrote him that way on purpose, I couldn’t help starting when I saw how Raven, the titular gun of the story, was described as a ‘mangy wolf in a cage.’ That probably helped me to notice that the entire story of his single-minded vendetta against the men who had double-crossed him –that’s Parker’s story in The Hunter. Very freely adapted. Raven is an assassin, not a thief. He was hired to kill an idealistic politician on the continent, who was proving an impediment to a British industrialist who hopes to get another big war going –good for business.

Raven’s employers had betrayed him to the cops after he’d done the job. They wanted to cover their tracks–he’d resist arrest, get shot down, loose ends all tied up. In retrospect, this seems like a bit of a plot hole. Why would they risk him being captured alive, talking to the law? It’s a fine book, but it has quite a few weak spots, that Westlake would have noted as aptly as its strengths.

The point is, Raven’s hunting the rich man’s paymaster, Cholmondeley, following him to a little industrial town–Raven knows his number is nearly up, and he just wants to take the guys who screwed him over down with him. A compulsion he can’t shake, a driving obsession–maybe even an instinct–he can seem very human and vulnerable at times, but at others he really does seem like some kind of predatory automaton–a killing machine who finally gets pointed in the right direction.

Cholmondeley, a fat frightened flunky, has delusions of being an impresario, uses his money to fund cheap music hall entertainments, and sleep with the showgirls. That’s how Raven gets him–through that weakness. Then from Cholmondeley to Sir Marcus, the rich man, a sort of legitimate mobster. Then the cops kill Raven. Because he’s still a villain, a murderer, and he’s got to be punished. Even though technically he just averted, or at least delayed, a second world war (in The Assassination Bureau, Oliver Reed is decorated as a hero, and gets to screw Diana Rigg–unfair!).

It’s more complicated than that, as well as a bit preachy and Little Englander at points, and though Greene was certainly right about a war coming (not so hard to spot on the horizon from Britain in the mid-30’s), it’s rather unfortunate that his rich warmonger is Jewish–that book has actually dated a lot in some respects, but it’s still Graham Greene, and Westlake couldn’t have thought he was going to improve on it–just streamline and repurpose it–get rid of all the excess baggage.

There’s a nice girl caught up in the story, just to remind us what nice people look like, provide a moral underpinning, a witness to Raven’s partial redemption (and someone to point him, like the gun he is, at the real villain of the piece). But that’s basically the whole story. Raven’s quest for retribution, which indirectly makes the world safe for Democracy, or whatever.

He’d never had a chance, being raised the way he was, in the class he was born into, with a nasty birth defect (harelip–they never put that in the movies, somehow), but God, Greene quietly implies, was using him for a higher purpose. And part of me thinks that purpose was to give Donald Westlake the bare bones idea for a book that wouldn’t be even the least bit preachy, about a wolf without a trace of mange in his coat. Better in every way? Of course not. But The Hunter holds together as a narrative in ways A Gun For Sale does not.

Westlake referred to this book more than once (as in the Samuel Holt novel What I Tell You Three Times Is False). He didn’t come close to plagiarizing Greene’s very different story and protagonist, but he still wanted to quietly admit the debt.

He was never going to come out and say “I got part of the idea for Parker’s hunt for Mal Resnick in The Hunter leading him to (eventually) kill Arthur Bronson in The Outfit from Graham Greene, and that’s why Parker finds Mal with a high class call girl, and Parker is, in some ways, an idealized version of Raven, translated into a Gold Medal style crime fiction paperback.” I mean, just reading that over, you’d see why no professional writer would ever say something like that, unless it was about something long in the public domain. (Anyway, that probably wasn’t even his only influence for that part of the plot, but another template I’ve since located will have to wait a bit.)

He just saw a fascinating but imperfectly motivated story and protagonist that he thought he could improve on. And on reflection, I’d say that’s exactly what he did. It’s not one of Greene’s more highly regarded books (one of his ‘entertainments’, as he called them), and I doubt Greene would have minded that much had he ever noticed, but better safe than sorry.

And I talked about some of this already, in my review of The Hunter, but see, I didn’t stop reading books not written by Westlake after that, so these things keep jumping out at me. Even just rereading Greene’s book a bit today, I came across a section relating to Anne, the young woman who Raven abducts to keep her from going to the cops, and then her kindness brings out something resembling a conscience in him.

Some other minor villain has bound and gagged Anne, and when Raven finds her that way, unconscious, he’s terrified she’s dead–then she wakes up, and their adventure continues. His emotions on finding her like that are wild, contradictory, confused. He’s swearing to avenge her before he revives her.

In The Hunter, Parker needs a place to scope out the mob hotel Mal has taken refuge in, and towards that end he knocks out a woman in a beauty shop, binds and gags her, and when he returns, he finds out she’s asphyxiated–she had asthma. He didn’t mean to kill her, as there was no reason to do so, but feels no remorse, just irritation at the pointlessness of it. This marks the only time in the twenty-four Parker novels that he causes the death of a (presumably) innocent person. It sticks out a bit–the shop could just as easily have been deserted, or the woman could have lived. Why put that in there at all? Aside from the fact that something similar happens in Greene’s book?

Westlake, intrigued by that moment in Greene’s book, wants to test his protagonist’s reaction to having caused the death of someone he had no quarrel with. He intends for Parker to die at the end, just as Raven did–though he wrote later that this seemed wrong to him at the time, false. Is life really fair like that? Death isn’t a moral ending slapped on by the Hayes Office. Everybody dies, often sooner than they expected.

Westlake’s point is to prove to himself that this character isn’t Raven, who is still very much a human being under all his bloody-minded cynicism. Parker isn’t eaten alive with resentment and guilt. We’re not going to hear about his unhappy childhood. He has no class consciousness, because he’s in a class by himself. There are certain things he’s got to do, and he does them. There’s no moral other than “Know yourself, know your capabilities, know what has to be done.” Someone like Anne might be safe from him, but she’d never get to him. She wouldn’t be able to appeal to his conscience, use him like a weapon.

That’s the first major influence I found–the most recent relates to Rose (aka Wanda), a bright enticing redhead working for The Outfit as a call girl, who knew Parker in the past, and self-evidently has been carrying a torch for him. He goes to her hoping she can help him find Mal. She does, eventually. It doesn’t work out very well for her. Parker is carrying no reciprocal torch.

That’s another odd little episode that somehow fits into the book, yet sticks out. The point of all these encounters is to tell us who Parker is, how he’s different–but in this case, different from whom? Well, in this case, from Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.

I’ve read very little Chandler. I’ve long known Westlake wasn’t his biggest fan (as has been multiply attested to, by Lawrence Block and others), but I didn’t really know why. In hardboiled detective fiction, there’s the Hammett School, and there’s the Chandler School, and Westlake was firmly in the first column. But sometimes he took a little from Column B, just to see how it tasted.

Chandler is basically the guy who invented the popular and deeply stereotyped image of the private detective–yes, Hammett and many others got there first, and Hammett was much better, but Chandler really created most of what we now would call the romantic clichés surrounding private detectives in hardboiled crime fiction. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” Really? Then how far do you suppose that man’s going to get down those streets? Is what Westlake was thinking.

Anyway, I’m as much of a sucker for those clichés as anyone, and I had a chance to read a vintage first edition of Farewell My Lovely a short while back, so I took it. I get why people liked him so much, and still do. He had some serious skills. Crafting a solid believable story featuring properly motivated characters was not one of them. Westlake was on the money, as usual. But he still would have read quite a bit of Chandler before reaching that conclusion.

No, there’s nothing I can find in the second Marlowe novel (Chandler’s favorite among his books) that reminds me of The Hunter. Though Moose Malloy reminded me of a less hulking more dimwitted version of Tiny Bulcher. Different franchise.

Reading the novel put me in mind of the short-lived 1980’s cable series, Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. Not a creative high point for HBO, but also not without its pleasures, not least of which was Kathryn Leigh Scott’s take on Anne Riordan, a bright enticing redhead who Marlowe first met in Farewell My Lovely (she’s not the title character). Anne didn’t appear in any subsequent Marlowe novels, but after many years, she made her second and final appearance in 1959, when Chandler published the very last Marlowe story, The Pencil. He died that same year.

The relationship between Marlowe and Riordan is frustrating. I mean really frustrating. They meet cute at a murder scene, and she spends the rest of that book and the subsequent short story throwing herself at him, and he likes her as much as he’s liked any woman. She is, when you get right down to it, the girl of his dreams, and he keeps giving her the brush-off. She’s basically too perfect–she likes solving mysteries, she can match Marlowe wisecrack for wisecrack, she doesn’t scare easy, she’s smart as a whip–she’s a dead cop’s daughter. She knows the score.

And in The Pencil, taking place years after their first encounter (which ended with her asking to be kissed), she lets it drop that she’s still a virgin at 28, and none too pleased about it, and not asking for any jewelry, and they should just adjourn to her nearby bedroom right now. He doesn’t want to ruin her. Whatever that means. So he keeps giving her the brush, and she keeps taking it, and running whatever errands he has for her. And this is generally regarded as the most convincingly three-dimensional female character Chandler ever created, folks. I mean, she’s not his long-suffering gal friday, like Sam Spade’s Effie–he’s not even pretending to pay for her services.

Now I head-cast Marlowe as Robert Mitchum a few pages into Farewell My Lovely (Mitchum in the 40’s, I mean–how it took until 1975 for Hollywood to get around to that, I’ll never know–would you believe they wanted Richard Burton for that movie?). In the books, he’s frequently described as a very attractive man, and he leads an exciting life, and he’s good with the banter. So bearing all that in mind, it’s not implausible Miss Riordan would hold onto a wee torch. But she’s toting a torch that would snap the Statue of Liberty in half. (See, you get into the habit of making colorful expressions like that when you read Chandler).

So anyway, why is Anne Riordan in The Pencil, if Marlowe isn’t going to make a dishonest woman of her at last (and didn’t he get married to some simpering heiress in the last novel, that Robert B. Parker finished)? Because he needs a favor. He’s got a client who’s had a hit put on him by the syndicate. Or, as it is known in that 1959 story, The Outfit.

Yeah. That got your attention. You thought Westlake was doing research on the Chicago mob for a story set mainly in New York? Westlake never cared about getting the fine details right when he was writing about organized crime–to him, that’s just a metaphor for corporate culture, organization men. He got The Outfit from Chandler, or at least the name for it. But again, what he does with it–entirely different.

Marlowe needs to find out who the hitters the Outfit is sending are, where they’re staying. So he sends Anne to the airport to spot them, and report back to him. He’s worried about the risk to her (bizarrely, he’s less worried about this than his mobbed up client, who hasn’t even met Anne), and it seems a bit perverse to use her that way when he could just as easily hire some stringer, but it gets her into the story.

He can talk to her about the wrap-up to the case at the end of the story, when they have dinner at the famous Romanoff’s in L.A., with champagne and everything, and this is the last we see of Philip Marlowe and Anne Riordan, and once Chandler wasn’t around anymore to hold them back, I say they tore each others clothes off right there in the fancy restaurant and did it on the table, while the waiter looked on with a mixture of disapproval and arousal. Try and stop me, copper!

So again–the same story, turned on its head. Parker goes to Wanda’s apartment seeking help, appealing to ‘the loyalty of friendship’ as she puts it, somewhat sarcastically. She’s throwing passes the whole time and he’s not catching any, because he’s Parker. It’s been explained to us. No sex while he’s working. He sort of hints maybe they could get together after he’s done, but only because he needs her help. If she happened to be there when he was done, he’d give her all she could handle and more, but Parker couldn’t carry a torch if you welded it to one of those big veiny hands of his.

He’s just using her. And he’s not pretending otherwise, at least not to himself. Not the way Marlowe uses Anne, while never quite admitting that he’s doing that. Marlowe has a tendency to say things like “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.” I can appreciate the sentiment, and still think to myself that’s a big stack of baloney, and so’s Marlowe, most of the time.

When Parker thinks Wanda’s betrayed him (like Lynn), tipped Mal off, he’s in a rage–much less in control of himself than in the later books. But she hasn’t, and now fearing for her life, she gets the information he needs, but by a less discreet method, that leads back to her. When Parker leaves, she’s getting ready to pack up and run, before her employers get wise. He should be guilty about this. He’s not. No champagne at Romanoff’s for Parker and Rose/Wanda. She’s never heard from again. And the point is that Parker, unlike Marlowe, is an honest bastard. He’s not dishing out any baloney.

So is that it? Not even close. But I think I’m going to need a Part 2 to deal with it all. And by all, I mean all I’ve found up to now. There’ll be more, I’ve no doubt. But let me get something out of the way here–all the books people might think were an influence, but aren’t. Why? Because I say so. But I’ll say why I say so, because that’s what I do here.

People often point to a book written by a different Marlowe, name of Daniel J. You know the name of that game. And there’s another book Westlake made no secret of his admiration for (and therefore, a book he’d be damned cautious about taking anything too obvious from). You may note my title is itself an homage. And finally, Parker’s one true rival in the field of cold blooded crime fiction bastardry. Who beat him to the bookstands by seven years.

I’ve read Dan J. Marlowe’s bloody masterpiece maybe three times now–I have a British reprint of the Gold Medal original paperback I cherish like it was made of real gold. In many ways, it’s the best novel ever written about a bank robber (much more specialized than Parker). But it’s in the first person, multiple chapters are devoted to telling us where this guy came from and why he is the way he is (short version–it’s always somebody else’s fault), and even though there’s a revenge subplot, it’s got nothing in common with Parker’s. Telling a story about a thief and killer who has no guilt over being a thief and killer isn’t a plot idea, it’s just a concept that could occur independently to many people. Westlake took nothing from this book.

And that’s not just my opinion. Because he couldn’t have taken anything from it if he’d wanted to. Because as we now know, those two books were in the gestation stage about the same time. (So was I, actually. Must have been something in the air.) Westlake showed Lawrence Block the manuscript of the book he was planning to submit to Gold Medal sometime around the end of 1960 or the start of 1961. And thanks to Charles Kelly’s brilliant biography of Marlowe, we know that at that same time, he was living with a couple in Florida, working on his book. No way of knowing who finished first, but we can be quite sure there was zero influence on either end–which is not to say they never influenced each other. That’s an entirely different article I keep putting off writing.

Anatomy of a Killer is clearly a book that influenced Westlake in many ways (he drops little references to it here and there), and elements of it may have gone into the creation of Parker–it came out in 1960, so there was time. But since that book is itself clearly following in the wake of A Gun For Sale, I’d call it a secondary influence. Rabe’s assassin is a rather pitiable, almost adolescent figure, who switches off his humanity to do his job. Rabe usually made his hit men menacing supporting characters, with little in the way of an inner life, but here he wanted to delve deeper into what might make a man choose that job. Basically the job chose him, and he went along with it. Then he meets a pretty girl, and gets confused. Confusion is almost invariably deadly in a Rabe novel (in a Stark novel as well).

Some of how Rabe gets into his characters’ heads, describes their emotions, certainly impacted Westlake. But that would be just as true of Rabe’s other books, some of which Westlake liked even more. Point is, it’s mainly a stylistic influence, the way the story is told, much more than the story itself–I’ve read pretty nearly all of Rabe’s books, and I didn’t see much in the way of direct influence–except maybe Westlake was trying to improve on one of Rabe’s weakest books, The Out is Death, when he wrote The Jugger, and as I mentioned in my review of that book, Westlake ended up thinking he’d failed in that attempt (I disagreed, and you can read that review to find out why).

So that leaves Mr. Ripley. I don’t doubt Westlake read the book within a few years of its publication. He probably read most of Highsmith, adapted her once (it didn’t work out), admitted to finding her both fascinating and repellent, which was a common enough reaction. Perhaps he had some problems with Highsmith’s intriguingly convoluted writing style that sometimes makes even her most ardent admirers throw up their hands in despair, but he would have appreciated her gift for looking below the surface of things. It’s one of the most original pieces of work in all of crime fiction–I’m not sure the qualifier is even needed. It would be difficult to find a previous story in the annals of popular storytelling where somebody who committed cold blooded murder–not of some stranger, but a friend!–was not punished in some way.

But Ripley and Parker have little else in common. Ripley feels guilt all the time–it just doesn’t stop him from doing what he feels he has to do. He sees himself as a force for evil. He doesn’t live in the present like Parker does–the past is always haunting him, often in physical form. We’re told in almost excruciating detail what he’s thinking and experiencing at all times. That’s the point, from Highsmith’s POV–to get all the way into his head, which I’d argue is actually her head–an aspect of her own personality, that she both dislikes and wishes she could give freer rein to. Ripley is a sociopath, not a wolf in human form. He’s very much a human being, but with some crucial parts left out, which makes him at the same time more and less free than the rest of us.

And most importantly, Ripley is a dabbler in crime, a dilettante–the ultimate amateur. Parker is the ultimate professional. He’s not playing games. Ripley never does anything else. Nor does Ripley have that weird trigger in his head like Parker, that when pushed, leads him to incessantly hunt down those who have offended him in some way.

But what both books have in common, of course, is their lack of moral pretense, embodied by a ‘hero’ who defies all social norms, and somehow never pays the price. So I could see Westlake reading that and wondering if he could get away with it–but he wasn’t in Highsmith’s position. She wasn’t a huge bestselling author, but she had a certain prestige most crime writers never had, partly because of her association with Hitchcock via Strangers on a Train. Partly because she became a sort of protege of Graham Greene’s, who rather oddly found her a kindred spirit. But mainly because most of her books were published in hardcover. She didn’t do series fiction until the 70’s, and she never did much of it.

She was in a somewhat more refined area of publishing, and she was writing about more refined sorts of characters, and the rules were different. She was pushing the envelope pretty hard, but she had that option open to her. Westlake didn’t think he did. He didn’t even think he could let Parker live past the end of The Hunter, until Bucklin Moon told him that would be the condition for Pocket Books picking up the option Gold Medal had passed on. Which those who have read my earlier review of The Hunter will know I think was an offer Mr. Moon made for reasons as much personal as professional.

Bad guys are supposed to die, no matter how much you like them. It’s a fictional convention that stretches far beyond the confines of genre. You can find it in Tolstoy. You can find it in ancient mythology. You can find it in the goddam bible. Exceptions are rare. Dan J. Marlowe’s protagonist was only a half-exception, since at the end of his first book he’s alive, unrepentant, but in a sort of living hell. Ripley is still looking nervously over his shoulder for the cops at the end of his book. That final shoe doesn’t drop for him until the last novel.

And by the time Ripley came back for another go, Parker had already appeared in a dozen outings. He, more than than any character in fiction that I know of, would define what it meant to be a really bad guy and get away with it–over and over and over again, with a lot less excess verbiage along the way. And what makes him so different from any of the other literary badmen I’ve compared him to here is that he keeps his secrets a lot better. He’s a protagonist treated almost like an enigmatic supporting character. Because that is, in many ways, how Westlake conceived him.

And when I get back to this–this week, next week, not sure yet–I’ll delve deeper into his consciousness–and his antecedents–without the slightest hope of ever fully comprehending either. Because Parker always gets away. The Hunter is never successfully hunted. But I’ll do my best to stay on the scent.

Jessup was half-good, which is the other side of being half-assed. He knew how to do some things right but he wasn’t careful enough, he didn’t follow through on the reasons for doing this or that or the other. He would be one of those people who live their lives as a movie, in which they star and direct and write the story. That kind goes for drama, like traveling with a Manny. Or the way they handled Keegan. Or what they did to Claire with Morris’ body. And a man like that won’t crawl across a floor to a doorway, not if his life depends on it.

That was the edge Parker had; he knew that survival was more important than heroics. It isn’t how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose.

Up to now, the Parker novels were all paperback originals, that never saw a hardcover edition, and could be found at newsstands, drug stores, and other places cheap tawdry books were sold. No coincidence that in Adios, Scheherazade, Westlake had an alternate universe version of Stark, named Rod Cox (who has a contract with a paperback house called ‘Silver Stripe’) appear as the now-successful author who started out doing near-porn, and is farming out his pseudonym. The joke there is that Rod isn’t really respectable either. Respectable authors get published in hardcover, then reprinted in paperback. The crime paperbacks are right next to the smut at the newsstand.

Westlake had stopped publishing books under his own name at Random House, because he’d signed on with Simon & Schuster–but only as Westlake. As Tucker Coe, he’d continued to publish books for their hardcover mystery division. Now Richard Stark would join Coe there. The Grofield novels written as Stark had already seen hardcover publication at MacMillan’s Cock Robin mystery division–which come to think of it, is probably one reason why the first three Grofields weren’t heist stories. The typical Stark narrative didn’t fit the publishing niche.

But Westlake obviously continued to maintain professional ties with his first major publisher, and somehow it was arranged for Parker to come over there, as his relationship with Gold Medal fizzled out, along with the market for paperback originals. That deliciously lurid era of publishing was coming to a close. Parker and his ilk would need to find alternative venues for their exploits.

Please note that Deadly Edge was not, like most prior Westlake novels for this publisher, referred to as a ‘Random House Mystery’ on the cover. It doesn’t seem to have been put out specifically by the mystery division there. It’s just a novel published by Random House. Unknown whether Lee Wright, the Random House editor Westlake most esteemed, was involved with it, though if it was up to him, she surely would have been.

Most houses were reorganizing themselves at this time, as the business changed, so maybe this wasn’t such an issue anymore. But this isn’t labeled a mystery, nor is it from some peripheral imprint of a large house–this is a mainstream book from a mainstream publisher (the mainstream publisher). It isn’t a paperback original, so it’s not being specifically marketed to men, as crime paperbacks invariably were. Hardcover mysteries, as Westlake said, were marketed more to women, but this isn’t a mystery either, in the conventional sense. So what audience is it aiming for?

Westlake, and presumably Wright (if she was involved) would know that Parker’s fanbase was a great deal more diverse than might have been thought. Women did read Parker novels (and still do). Men weren’t going to stop buying them just because they were hardcovers and you had to go into a real bookstore to buy one (horrors).

And leaving the gender issues aside, the times they are a’ changin–and Parker has at times seemed to be operating in a dimension where the 1930’s never ended, and Dillinger is still Public Enemy #1 (while somehow Parker never makes the list at all).

This worked because Parker himself is so clearly oblivious to social changes that don’t directly impact the way he does business. For example, he knows that the electronic transfer of funds is becoming more and more prevalent, because it’s harder and harder to find large amounts of cash that aren’t too well guarded to heist, which makes him more likely to take a risk on an unconventional score if there’s a lot of cash involved. He may notice men’s clothing just enough so that he can dress himself without standing out in a crowd. Most changes in the world around him are just surface noise to him, not relevant, and therefore ignored.

But for the reader, there’s an increasing dissonance to the way Parker lives and lets die in this ever-changing world in which we live in–meaning that maybe it’s time for that to change. For example, maybe it’s time for him to stop living in hotels all year ’round–give him a base of operations, something more down to earth. And maybe the way the books are written, the style itself, has to be updated a bit. Without losing everything that makes the books unique. And maybe Parker himself has to be updated slightly, but that’s going to be harder. That’s going to take some real finesse. Can Stark do finesse?

One thing that clearly had to be updated was the depiction of organized crime. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was published in 1969, and while the mob has never been 100% Italian (crime is everybody’s thing), to show it as anything other than Italian-run was just not going to be credible anymore, and certainly not in an urban setting. Parker had done extremely well against the seemingly WASP and Irish dominated organization known as The Outfit (which would be shown to still exist on some level), but could he hack it in the world of La Cosa Nostra? In three of the next four books, he’d be given a chance to prove he could.

This book would have been written around the same time as the final Grofield outing, Lemons Never Lie, and shares a fair few plot points with it. In both books we see the protagonist in an unconventional domestic setting with his female companion of choice, and in both cases he’s got to leave that domestic scene to take care of business, leaving his woman undefended. But Parker is not Grofield, and things arrange themselves quite differently in most respects.

The first real change is that the book opens right at the start of a heist, which neither Stark nor Westlake had ever done before (though Jim Thompson had, in The Getaway). None of the novels had opened with the classic “When such and such happened, Parker did something” riff since The Handle in ’66, none would again until Comeback in ’97, but the opening to this one in ’71 is radically different, not even mentioning Parker’s name or describing any significant action until the second paragraph. That had never happened before, and it never happened again–in all prior and subsequent novels, Parker is there in the very first sentence. Doing stuff.

Parker is working with a solid string of pros, guys we haven’t seen before, and they’re standing on the roof of an old theater, the Civic Auditorium in an unnamed city, which is going to be demolished soon, part of an urban renewal program–change is in the air, literally–they can feel the vibrations of a rock concert going on below them, and as they cut their way through the roof, the music gets louder and louder.

Their objective is the box office take, all in cash, because of the impending switch-over to the new theater. Ticketron had gotten started a few years earlier–a lot fewer people buying their tickets right there at the theater on the day of the concert, but they have no choice this time, and it’s a big concert, featuring several popular bands. Not the first time Parker has come into contact with rock&roll–remember Paul Brock’s little record store in the Village, in The Sour Lemon Score?–but this is the first real acknowledgement that rock is now the dominant musical form, something that Westlake the jazz buff must have had mixed emotions about.

Since Parker cares nothing for music, Stark expresses that conflict through the other members of the string. There’s Keegan, the capable but nervous and pessimistic electrical expert, Briley, the lanky affable Tennessean, and Morris, youngest of the group–a member of the rock generation, who would probably be going to see this concert if he wasn’t in the process of robbing it.

Keegan and Briley get into a bit of a musical debate as they make their way down through the breached roof into the building, and the music keeps getting louder.

“Listen to that music,” Keegan said peevishly. “What the hell ever happened to jazz?”

“It’s still there,” Briley said, going over to the filing cabinets, “in the same gin mills it always was. When did jazz ever play a joint like this?”

“Jazz at the Phil,” Keegan said. “I used to have all those records, before that time I got sent up.”

“Jazz at the Phil,” Briley said scornfully. “Fake.” He opened a file drawer. “Empty! There’s a break.”

“What do you mean, fake? All the greats were on Jazz at the Phil.”

“Okay,” Briley said. “Give us a hand here, will you?”

Keegan went over to help him move the filing cabinet. “I don’t know how you can call them a fake. My God! Lester Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges–”

(Keegan isn’t quite the jazz maven he thinks he is–he’s conflating Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, both of whom participated in the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts and recordings produced by Norman Granz, which many an old school purist did sniff at, but which remain brilliant records to this day. Westlake, who probably had all those records himself, knows full well that the kvetchy Keegan made a mistake–maybe Briley does too, and doesn’t want to rile his partner in crime up any more. That’s a real inside baseball joke, and just the kind of thing Westlake loved to do–there for the people sharp enough to spot it–and I missed it the first time I read this one, so some maven I am).

Part One of the book is nothing but the heist, and it’s a good one, offbeat yet believable, very much in the now, no sense of anachronism, except to the extent that Parker himself is an anachronism, and always has been. Not truly a part of any era he might find himself in. The guns he and his colleagues are using are quite contemporary by contrast–three Smith & Wesson Model 39’s, which went on the market in 1955, and were still being used by U.S. Navy SEALs. Parker atypically hangs onto his after the job is done, for reasons we’ll get to shortly.

The job goes smoothly, with just a few minor wrinkles. Nobody gets hurt, and they score a decent haul, nothing amazing–about 16g’s a man. Stark heisters tend to be percentage players. Still and all, according to an inflation calculator I just checked, sixteen thousand dollars then had almost the same purchasing power as one hundred thousand dollars today. And lest we forget, tax free. Parker’s presumably still submitting a tax return, but he’s not reporting this income.

He’s still caching part of his split, and bringing the rest back to Claire. It’s been about four years since the events of The Jugger forced him to start over from scratch–that matches up with what we’re told in Lemons Never Lie–obviously, since they were written around the same time.

Anyway, Part One is just prologue. This one isn’t really about the heist itself. None of Parker’s colleagues try to pull a cross, they have no troubles with the law, they get back to the hideout and divide the loot four ways, and after waiting a few days for things to calm down, they all head off to spend their ill-gotten gains.

There’s just one complication–a fifth man, Berridge, opted out of the job at the last minute, supposedly because he’d decided he was too old to hack it in the heisting world anymore. But there he is at the hideout–dead. Somebody killed him, and it wasn’t a clean job. His head was caved in with a wrench. This isn’t a murder mystery. So they don’t try to solve the murder. But maybe they should have.

Part Two picks up with Parker meeting Claire at a house she’s just purchased for them in Northwestern New Jersey. It’s on a small lake called Colliver Pond, and is located within a few miles of the borders of New York State and Pennsylvania, which means it has to be in Sussex County. Not a lot of people are familiar with that part of the state. It’s very rural, quite remote, even though it’s less than a hundred miles from Manhattan. Pretty country–not the part of the state I grew up in (see my review of The Man With the Getaway Face), but I’ve spent a little time there. Lot of black bears in Sussex. No wolves, up to now.

Claire is feeling the nesting impulse. She’s tired of swanky hotels in Florida and New Orleans and such. It’s been fun, they can still do it sometimes, but she wants a place of her own–security (Parker might not come back someday, and then what?). She’s taken Parker’s peculiar needs into account–two state lines nearby–little in the way of local law–the houses around the lake are mainly summer homes, so there are few people around most of the year–they can go somewhere else in the summer. Probably gets damn cold in the winter, but that won’t be a problem. She makes that point quite adequately when she joins Parker in the shower.

This is the last book to feature Claire as a major POV character, and to get into her head to any great extent. It’s definitely the most ‘domestic’ of the Parkers, and I have to think this is at least partly because of the assumption (accurate or not) that more women would be reading Parker novels now that they were in hardcover, so you had to make him seem like a better boyfriend (though I suspect many if not most female Parker fans are identifying with him, not Claire). At one point, talking to him on the phone she thinks “His voice is very dear to me”–possibly the first person to ever react to his voice that way. She’s not quite the same kind of fantasy she was before. She is, for all intents and purposes, his wife. At least in her mind.

Parker’s mind is harder to plumb, as always. He’s being as accommodating as he can with Claire, making a conscious effort to appear interested in the house, genuinely pleased at how much thought she put into it, but it’s impossible for him to think of any structure, any geographic location, as home. To the extent he has a home, she’s it.

He is compelled, as we have seen, to have a woman he can go back to after a job–a mate. He doesn’t stay with any one woman very long in the first eight books–not after Lynn betrayed him. Claire represented a return to his old pattern, but it’s not the same as it was with Lynn. He thinks to himself here that Lynn was hard, but she broke–Claire isn’t hard, but he believes she won’t break–more resilient, more intelligent, more adaptable.

He couldn’t handle being a free agent indefinitely; it was too destabilizing, too far from his instinctive drives. Does he love her? We’ve been over this before. If a wolf can love, Parker loves Claire. And there’s considerable evidence wolves can love. But not as we do. Perhaps that’s too bad for us. Stark clearly thinks so.

Claire has up to now avoided getting too sentimental about their relationship as well, but now that she’s got a house to wait for him in (purchased with the proceeds of his heists), the relationship has progressed for her. She doesn’t mind him being away, we’re told, because it’s pleasurable to think about him coming back, in his usual post-heist state of sexual excitement. She’s got her own domain now. Once he steps into the house, and then leaves, it’s really hers. She’s invested in it–maybe a little too invested.

Parker gets a call from Handy McKay a few days after his return–Handy had gotten some panicked-sounding phone calls from Keegan–something’s wrong, and he needs to talk to Parker directly, but he can’t leave a number because he’s on the move. Impressed by the sense of urgency he heard in the man’s voice, Handy gave Keegan the number of Claire’s house, which could be used to obtain its location. But Keegan never called. Parker has to go find out what’s going on (as he did when Joe Sheer wrote him in The Jugger). He wants Claire to go stay at a hotel in New York until he comes back.

And she won’t go. She’s just found this place, and she can’t abandon it. Her instinctive drives are as strong as his, and they’re telling her she has to stay. Parker doesn’t like it, but his drives are telling him to get on the trail before the scent goes cold. As she watches him leave, Claire wonders if women are as much a mystery to men as men are to women–she still hasn’t quite come to terms with who–and what–she’s living with.

The rest of Part Two is Parker traveling, finding Keegan not merely dead, but nailed to the wall–he’d clearly been tortured by somebody who is really into torture (I’m tempted to make a Cheney joke, but never mind). Knowing now that there’s a real problem, Parker tries once more, over the phone, to get Claire to pull up stakes and leave the house, before whoever is tracking down the concert heisters one by one makes it to Colliver Pond. She just won’t do it. He’s frustrated, and in his own unemotive way, worried. He tells her to remove any vestige of his presence from the house, and if anybody comes looking for him, say she’s just his answering service.

He goes looking for Briley, and in the process runs into a small branch of the Italian mob–their first real appearance in the series. Somebody looking for Briley killed a woman who ran a mob brothel, and the local capo wants Parker to help them find whoever did it–Parker says he works alone. He doesn’t always, of course, but it would take too long to explain, and you know how much he hates explanations.

The boss puts a tail on him. He lures them into a trap, disables their car, leaves them there. They say he’ll never get away with it; they’re national, and he’s just one guy. He’s heard that song before. He’ll be hearing it again before long.

When the mobsters pat him down for weapons, we find out Parker sometimes carries a knife in a sheath on his back–he can reach back for it and throw it, often hitting the target–a neat trick, if somebody has a gun on you and makes you put your hands behind your head. We never actually see him do this, but his knife-throwing skills factor pretty heavily into the next book, and Westlake wanted to set that up in advance.

Parker finds Briley dying–he offers no assistance, not that there’s anything he could do–and he finds something else–evidence of drug use by at least one of the people who killed Briley. These are not your typical old school pros. They’re effective, dangerous, unconventional–but sloppy. Amateurs. Again with the amateurs.

After he leaves Briley, still breathing but basically dead, Parker goes to a nearby diner, and calls Claire. She answers him very formally, addresses him as Mr. Parker. He gets the message. They’ve arrived.

Part Three is all Claire and the longest time we’ve spent in any character’s mind other than Parker’s since the early days of the series. The structure is different here–in the past, Part Three was usually switching from one character to another, chapter by chapter, and then we’re back inside Parker’s head for Part Four. Here we stick with Claire the whole way. It’s her show, and she’s not enjoying it much.

In the days following Parker’s departure, she whiles away the time in her new domicile, enjoying the life she’s found for herself, the secret heister’s moll–it’s a great fantasy. Nobody around her knows her secret–just going out to dinner with Parker is a thrill. Nobody knows she’s involved with one of the most dangerous men on the planet. Does she? Yes and no. She can be very honest with herself at times, very self-deceptive at others–it’s a coping mechanism. We all have them.

After Parker calls her, and she refuses to leave, she sets out to prepare herself for whoever might be showing up–she increasingly realizes, as Parker knew all along, that your typical country home, full of doors and windows, is not easy to defend.

She buys a hunting rifle, and teaches herself how to use it–it’s the ladies home edition of the type of outfitting we see Parker do all the time–unlike Parker, she can just walk into a sporting goods store and buy a gun. She also tries to get a dog, but there are none for sale right now who would be any use as guardians. We hear her thinking she’d love to get a puppy and train it–that would have been interesting, if she’d gone through with it–how would the dog react to Parker? How would Parker react to the dog? We’ll never know.

Did Westlake ever have the “Let’s get a dog” discussion with any of his wives? By this time he was living out in the country himself, and then he’d be traveling for work, and of course it would come up, and he wouldn’t want to say “I don’t want a dog because they scare me.” He’d see the logic behind having one–even a friendly dog is a deterrent to most burglars, and I know it was one reason my dad got us a dog when I was growing up–he traveled a lot. Westlake frequently mentions that people who live out in the country keep dogs for protection. But it’s pretty clear the Westlakes never had one, and neither will Claire.

She gets back to the house, walks in, and then realizes she’s not alone. There’s this weird-looking vaguely hippie-ish man on the couch, who is apparently tripping out. Then she turns around and there’s another one–also dressed a bit wild, with his hair frizzed out like an Afro, wearing a fringed leather jacket. The guy on the couch is Manny. The other one is Jessup. It’s really hard to say which is worse.

This is not a book about psychotic hippies. That’s just to give it a more contemporary spin. There’s no attempt by Stark to get into their heads, tell us anything much about their past, why they dress like that, who they are. Claire and Parker will have to try and understand them, but only for the purposes of survival. Westlake probably had his reservations about the counter-culture, but he’d dealt with it sympathetically in the past, and would again later.

The real point of these guys isn’t what subculture they’re from–it’s that they are amateurs who don’t know where to draw the line, or that any line exists. They smell money, and they want it. They don’t care what they have to do to get it. They don’t care who they hurt. They have a certain loyalty to each other, and they don’t think of themselves as bad guys, but real bad guys never do. In some ways, they’re like Parker, but without the self-knowledge, or the self-control. Claire compares both of them to wild animals in her mind, but the only animal that ever behaves like these guys is homo sapiens sapiens.

Jessup in particular feels familiar–we’ve seen variations on this guy in the past. Matt Rosenstein in The Sour Lemon Score, who was sort of in Parker’s subculture, but not really–only half a pro–he enjoyed the violence too much. His physical description is very reminiscent of Bruce Maundy from A Jade in Aries–I’m guessing these characters are all based on somebody from Westlake’s past–you know how Michelangelo put some guy whose guts he really hated in hell on the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Like that.

So Claire plays the role Parker instructed her to play–she knows nothing, she’s just the answering service. She’s just a little mouse, as she puts it. She’s had to deal with dangerous men before. Jessup takes a good look at her, and rape is in his mind, but she gets it out by fooling him into thinking she’s got some exotic kind of clap. For which he gives her a morally disapproving look–like I said, no self-awareness at all. There are so many people like this in the world, you wouldn’t believe it. Or maybe you would.

Manny is much more abstracted than Jessup. Well to put it another way, he’s nuts. He wants Claire to play a game called ‘Surrealism’–there are actually a lot of mind games associated with that artistic movement, but Manny seems to have come up with his own, where you pick a famous person, and then guess what kind of car they’d be, and like that. Manny can go from childish delight to fiendish rage in a heartbeat, so she has to step lightly.

So she plays the various games as best she can with these two guys, and when Parker calls, she lets him know what’s going on, without alerting Jessup (the brains of the outfit, such as they are). She hopes he’s not too far off.

They’re sitting down to a sort of pseudo-Mexican dinner Jessup cooked up, when the doorbell rings–it’s Morris. You remember–the young member of the string–the rocker. They’ve been looking for him, but he found them first. Only he’s not quite sure at first who they are. He sits down at the table with them–Claire can’t tell him anything without admitting she’s not who she’s been claiming to be–and he tells them a story.

Turns out Berridge had a grandson, who had a friend, and they found out about the money. Berridge refused to help them, and they killed him. Then they followed Keegan, and he gave them enough leads to find the others, except for Morris. Only see, they thought there was a lot more than there actually was–they didn’t believe Keegan when he said all he had was 16 grand. No sense of real-world limitations.

And just as Morris decides yeah, these are the guys, and draws down on them–well, he waited a bit too long. They get the jump on him, and good-bye Morris.

And as Part Three concludes, Claire, having barricaded herself in the bedroom, is realizing she’s got no more cards to play–she’s witnessed them commit a murder. They are not going to let her live. They probably wouldn’t have anyway. They trick her into emptying her rifle into Morris’ dead body on the porch. Then they break in and grab her.

But then it’s Part Four, and you know what that means. Parker’s here. We see the last few hours from his perspective–he stole a rowboat on the other side of the lake, and came across quietly. He gets there just as Jessup and Manny break into Claire’s room–and he puts a bullet in Manny’s arm. It’s not hard to freak out guys like this–they’re both cowards, as Claire contemptuously tells Parker–their nerve tends to fail at critical moments.

They run for their car–a Corvette, so either they stole it or they’ve been spending Keegan’s money damn fast–and try to get the hell out of Dodge. But Parker shoots out a few of their tires, so they can’t get far. He’s ready to end this. They’ve triggered that itch in his head that he can only scratch by killing whoever caused it.

Claire fills Parker in, and her information, combined with what he’s already learned, gives him insight into how these guys think. Enough to track them to an empty house nearby. Where he finds Manny tripping out again (of course). He creeps upstairs, through the darkened boarded-up house, lit up by one candle stuck in a wine bottle. He’s got to be careful how he disposes of them–he doesn’t want to leave blood on the floor if he can help it–nothing that might trigger alarm bells with the local law. He wants to kill these men in such a way as that nobody will ever connect their deaths to Colliver Pond.

So Parker has to use his hands–he finds Jessup in the dark, and begins to throttle the life out of him–but Manny, alerted by Jessup’s screams, comes in with a tiny .22 pistol, and tells him to stop. Jessup is half-dead by then, desperately in need of medical attention, so Parker tells Manny he’s going to need Parker to carry Jessup to the car, and drive him to the doctor. Without Jessup to think for him, Manny is easy to fool. But still cagey enough to sit in the back, with the gun pointed at Parker’s head.

Now Parker has to get them just a few miles away from there, so some other police department will be dealing with their corpses. Jessup comes to, and starts whispering to Manny through his badly damaged larynx–he knows Parker was doing more damage to his throat, even as he was carrying Jessup down to the car. He knows what’s coming, but it’s already too late. Parker is driving too fast. Shoot him, they all die. He makes it to a turn-off on the highway, and then into a construction site, and then he leaps from the speeding car, which collides with a tractor.

Parker’s legs are bruised, but he’s otherwise unhurt. And still armed. Manny never thought to take his gun. How have these two clowns made it this far? Jessup is out of the car, firing at him, and there’s a brief stalemate. That ends when Manny starts shrieking like the damned. Between his wounded arm and the crash, he’s in too much pain–he took a huge dose of the hallucinogenic drug he’s been using. His mind is collapsing on itself. And Jessup can’t take it. As twisted as their friendship might be, it’s all he’s got, and as Parker already knew, he lives for the drama. He runs out into the open to help his partner. And Parker shoots him. Then Manny. At this point, it’s the merciful thing to do. Not that mercy is even remotely the point.

He gets a ride back to Colliver Pond from a friendly farmer. He tells Claire they won’t be back. She knows what that means. She isn’t exactly glad, but she’s not the least bit sorry. Knowing the monsters are dead, she beckons to the far more terrible monster she lives with to join her on the couch, by the fire. The monster does so, and stares moodily into the flames. Thinking surprisingly human thoughts. He wishes she hadn’t turned the lights off, and lit that fire. It reminds him of the candle light in the dark house he found Manny and Jessup in. But he knows she meant it to be romantic, so he lets it go. He can be flexible. She’s worth it to him. She’s all the home he’ll ever have.

It’d be interesting to compare this book with Ripley Under Ground, the second book of the so-called ‘Ripliad’, which was published about a year before Deadly Edge. It’s barely possible Westlake read it before writing his radically different blue collar take on the same basic story. I kind of doubt he did–timing’s a bit close–and yet–the American edition was published by (wait for it)–Random House. Anyway, it’d be interesting to make the comparison, but I haven’t read any of the Ripleys yet (been saving them for a rainy day). I’ll do a Westlake/Highsmith piece one of these days. Going to have to, eventually.

Parker isn’t like Ripley–that much I know. Ripley needs to own things–he got started on his life of crime because of that desire to possess. He does want a home, a sense of place, culture, to make up for a certain blankness within himself. Parker has no such desires. Blankness is his natural state of being, except when he’s working (or with Claire, playing). The house is just a house to him. He could walk away from it without a backward glance, but Claire couldn’t. She’s lived there like five minutes, and it’s already a part of her.

As soon as Parker goes to hunt down Jessup and Manny, she starts cleaning it–to make it hers again. Before he does anything else, she makes him get rid of Morris’ body. It isn’t that she’s weak. It’s that she’s hanging onto something–something she desperately needs. And he doesn’t understand that need at all. He never could.

The book is about this dichotomy in their natures, and yet, as Parker muses, with those rare flashes of what might be called empathy that we get from him now and then, he can see that it’s not entirely different from the way he gets sometimes–the way he does things that make no sense in certain situations.

He looked at her, and understood vaguely that there was something in her head about the idea of home that wasn’t in his head and never would be. The world could go to hell if it wanted, but she would put her home in order again before thinking about anything else.

He tried to find something in his own mind to relate that to, so he could understand it better, and the only thing he came up with was betrayal. If someone double-crossed him in a job, tried to take Parker’s share of the split, or betray him to the law, everything else became unimportant until he had evened the score. And like the two tonight, Manny and Jessup; there was no way that Parker was not going to settle with them for the insult of their attack. In some way, what Claire was into now had to be something like that, with a sense of home instead of a sense of identity.

Identity. It always comes down to that in a Westlake novel, but the word itself appears only rarely in his books, as if he’s trying to hide the central theme of his work from us, make us work for it. And yet here he’s putting it into the head of his most nonverbal and uncommunicative protagonist. Perhaps because he was, in a sense, reintroducing Parker here, to the new world of ‘respectable’ hardcover publishing, and he felt the need to make things a little more clear than usual. Or perhaps because as Mary makes Grofield more three-dimensional in Lemons Never Lie, Claire makes Parker just a bit more human. But underneath, he’s still the same predator he was before.

At one point, she compares him to a gorilla–to which he responds “Gorillas have mates.” Yes, but they don’t hunt. Wolves do. And are hunted in return, by men. And in the next book in the queue, Parker finds himself hunted as never before. But the hunters in that book don’t know their quarry at all, and it will cost them dearly. Forget ‘Surrealism.’ Parker is the most dangerous game of all.

(Very belated postscript–Wikipedia gave me a bum steer–the first edition of Ripley Under Ground was published by Doubleday, not Random House. One of the few major houses Westlake never worked with (I don’t think they even reprinted any of his books). So the odds of his getting a sneak peek are very poor, making the timing very close indeed for Westlake to have been influenced by it. I’ve read the Ripley book now, and the differences are a lot more striking than the similarities. However, there’s this one scene–involving a hung effigy–that makes me wonder if I was right after all. And I’m still a long way off from writing that Westlake/Highsmith piece. But if Westlake did read Ripley Under Ground before writing Deadly Edge, it would be no more plagiarism than Bach doing a variation on a theme by Vivaldi doing a variation on a theme by Bach doing a variation on etc.–and yes, in this analogy, Westlake is Bach. There’s nothing insulting about being compared to Vivaldi.)